


Only a Kid

by bible



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1950s, Bad Overbites, Epistolary, Eye Licking, Greasers, Murder, Oingo Boingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 13:23:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,435
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11487282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bible/pseuds/bible
Summary: A short story of a juvenile delinquent confessing his crimes letter by letter to his not-best-friend who's definitely his friend. Inspired by Oingo Boingo's "Only a Lad." Haw haw.





	Only a Kid

**Author's Note:**

> A short story to pass the time. Enjoy and excuse any spelling/grammar errors. I will copyedit it soon enough.
> 
> (Do you think my school will publish this if I up my tuition more?)

**ONLY A KID**

_The following letters have been grammatically corrected for the detective’s convenience. Names have been changed or omitted to preserve the identities of the victims._

December 15, 1963  
Dear Victor,

            I’m real indebted to you for letting me air my dirty laundry like this. Of course, I know you’re doing it out of resentment but I feel like we’ve got a deal. A real, ice cold, hard gold deal. I’ll get to what happened only after I’ve drawn out my bragging rights to maximum capacity. I’ve never had a lot of friends in the first place and now I’m alone in this big city, stranded and isolated. Talk about a lonely crowd! You’ve given me a good opportunity to clear my mind. For years, I’ve been harboring this past under lock and key out of safety for myself. Not that it’d matter if I didn’t keep it to myself! And I’ll explain that later.

            I know you will be terrified but you shouldn’t be. I’m no creep. Which is why I’m avoiding the term “skeletons in the closet.” That’s real sick! I hate those guys, those ones who sit on the couch with their feet propped on the back of human furniture, those chicks crawling around without clothes. Usually kids, naked and stolen. It’s real sick. You can read about it in the papers. You can. I have no skeletons in the closet, they’re all on the body farms under scrutiny and I won’t hide it from no one. If anyone asks me, I’m inclined to tell the truth now. But I won’t step forward on my own.

            To be honest, I’ve never had anyone to talk about these things with. So I should start at the beginning. I know, you want quick and easy answers of the most recent thing but _chronological order_ is real important. For example, you ever read those books that go from past to present? Those Faulkner books? I can’t make heads or tails of it. So I’ll try my best to start from the beginning. If I start from what happened to your mom you’ll ask why and then I’ll have to go back and explain myself and I sure as hell ain’t no Faulkner.

            I was born (and bred, haw haw) with a taste for violence. My momma told me that when I was born I suckled her nipple until she bled and the milk turned pink and they couldn’t pry me off of her, cause I was just so evil, heart and soul, I swear. But I reckon I was just hungry. Now I know everyone’s got these nasty predilections about my momma, but she was no dope-smoking fiend, no white trash, no atheist. Now, I sure am, but she wasn’t. She was a single mother, yes, and no one knows my daddy. That’s the origin of the “bad seed,” according to her, which is a real funny image in my head. You open one of those sex education books at the library and see sperm cells, but imagine them ink-black and with a jagged-toothed mouth, giggling menacingly. Bad seed. That’s what made me.

            A bird just smacked its fat head into the plexiglass window. Startled me so bad! Sorry about the pen stain, I jumped out of my skin. I’m a real nervous fella. Perhaps the bird’s coming to avenge its ancestors. God knows I ain’t treated birds well.

            So skip a few years from the blood-sucking babe I am, and I’m four or five and I can retain my own memories. The bad seed’s grown into this wicked demon, this little anti-cherub. Give me a wiggly, pointed tail and some horns. I know that’s how all those church-going ladies from April Hill think of me. (I think Walt Disney’s really ruining some perceptions of religion. I can’t even picture heaven without thinking of that _Tom and Jerry_ episode. I even remember the name. “Heavenly Puss.” Just like your mom’s.)

            Well, I’m crawling through the tall grass in the backyard. It’s this dead-weed grass, haywire and trampled in places by years of grandpa’s work. Grandpa was sitting on the back porch, watching me while momma was out shopping or going to church or something. It evades me in my old age of nineteen. But the skinny bastard nodded off. His head was brown from the sun and it jutted out of his shirt, the cords in his neck standing out tense. Neck so skinny, it was like his head was a melon he was balancing on a straw. He had a head of combover grey hairs over his speckled scalp. He was rocking in his chair, back and forth, the slow creaking sound becoming a melody. But in my head, I was playing hunter. Crawling in the tall grass and jumping at the frightened puppy my mom had. It cowered from me when I played with it, its fur tangled and peppery like steel wool. Silence is an alibi [sic (9/18/66): perhaps John meant _ally_ ] for the killer. And this _creeeeaaak, creeeeaaak, creeeeaaaak,_ was disrupting the prowl. I stopped crawling, back arched low like those lions on safaris, hind legs up and wiggling, and tried to pounce on where I reckoned the dog was. But that creaking had scared the hound off. I fell on my palms and my face went flat into the dirt, caking up my skin and scabbing my palms, my mouth tasting like beetroot. No puppy-dog in sight.

            Boy, you wouldn’t imagine how upset I was! This is a real travesty for the hunter. The creaking rocking chair was footsteps in a forest during duck season. Plus, I was a kid, and I reckon I was a bit irrational back then. (Haw haw.)

            Well, I didn’t know what to do. The puppy was out of sight and the rocking chair was creaking. Creaking, creaking, almost infinite. It began sounding like the wheezing of a body. It sounded like the wailing of those non-stop car alarms. Loud neighbors and fireworks way past New Years. That kind of noise. The kind that makes your blood itch at your skin from inside, makes you sick with anger.

I crept up on him. The morning sun was already hot before nine PM and he was shiny with sweat. He looked dead. He looked like a withered piece of jerky, shimmering with remnants of embalming fluid. Seemed like Norman Bates’s mama in the basement. So still and lifeless but that rocking chair was going. Boy, was I angry. Any kid would have yelled, “You ruined the game!” and demanded reparations only to be delivered a quick spanking.

            Well, I’d had my fits before and I knew I wasn’t about to live down a spanking with my dignity intact. Even then I wasn’t scared of humiliation but the fragile baby part of you doesn’t retain a sense of pride, I don’t think.

            Grandpa taught me how to light matches.

            You might think it’s irrational. But I was only a kid. I was infuriated, the way you are when your parents prohibit you from a concert they SAID you could attend. I ain’t here to argue over if it’s justifiable. (What a hard word to spell. I got the dictionary by me.) Grandpa was a hell of an annoyance, always snapping at me to stand up and tuck the surplus of my shirttail in. Always parting my hair like some duck-wing combover. Fella couldn’t keep his hands off me, I swear on my life.

            And now he prohibited the hunt. My alone time. The final stretch of opportunity for play before I was carted off to daycare at ten. They say daycare, but we all know it’s school. Daycare don’t got worksheets.

            Well, I didn’t want to go to school either.

            There were things you could do to keep yourself from school. Being sick was one. One time a girl, Patty, got to leave school for a funeral, celebrating the death of her great uncle, in California.

            It worked out in my fat baby head and I grabbed this colorful pack of matches. When I lit it, it looked so innocent. This simple little flicker reminded me of Christmas time candles smelling of ivy and spiced apple pie and I was worried it wouldn’t work. Now, I was no fool even back then. I knew that if that rocking chair was gonna keep on rocking, it’d put out any flame with the fanning back-and-forth motion.

            So I went to the weeds, I went to my hunting ground. That landscape (wild and mangled and crawling at the peeling porch where grandpa sat sleeping) was as dry and flammable as a forest in drought. I set the flame to a dandelion first. Its spores caught and withered and went black. It was a slow process. The stem was eaten, devoured, curled, and then it spread to the short fuzzy leaves. I noted how much faster the flame was catching on when it spread to the ground.

            I’ve never been dumb.

Sure, I ain’t like to learn things.

            But I like to BURN THINGS!

I ran. I ran away, into the street, into that empty expanse of country land, and watched our hideous, short house, recently defaced with orange paint, be digested by the power of the fire. It was tall and ravaging and beautiful and I couldn’t believe how weak people were in the face of nature.

            Up went the fire in a beautiful blazing shiver of light and smoke. The house creaked and wheezed and blackened and shivered and the mean line someone painted in hideous construction site orange disappeared. Some jerkoff wrote the real creative line: WHITE TRASH. It was good to see it go. Go with grandpa and that house and that bed and that puppy. And I sat, mourning only this slice of watermelon I had wrapped in tin foil on the counter.

            Would have been good to grab it. That fire sure was hot and I was sweating. Nothing like cool fruit on a summer day.

            I’ll always remember sitting under the endless expanse of yawning blue sky in the street, watching the house go down and wanting nothing but some watermelon. Even to this day, I love them. A summer rind peeled away, its insides cold and to be scooped at with a spoon. Watermelons bleed pink.

            Since we didn’t have no neighbors back in that time, no one saw for a while til the house was fully eaten. By then I’m sure it was past school but I wasn’t paying attention to the time. Our house was sat upon a hill, our yard scattered with plastic and some fruit rinds. We had no trees. A brown road cut the hill horizontal to our house and the only people that drove on it besides mom were lost travelers passing between Austin and San Antonio.

            Well, some legal exchanges happened and mom drove home screaming when she heard what had happened, weeping at the loss of her second male figure of importance. She looked around for me, her face red and blotched and streaky and I was wondering why in the hell she was wearing a pink dress when she spotted me. She ran over and pulled me into her arms like I was weightless, and my skin crawled. Her arms were under my thighs and I hated it. I wasn’t a baby anymore. She was stroking my black hair and going, “My baby, my baby,” and I was wondering when she’d let me down.

            I knew we didn’t have to go to school so I didn’t have a fit.

            She sat in the back of the police car with me and cried and cried. I watched cops mill around the house, now extinguished and smoking rubble. They were talking and I heard it distantly, as though underwater.

            A detective, thin and handsome and moustached, jerked open the back door. The hot air from outside poured in and I shivered with heat bumps, but I thought it was so hot it was cold back then. I “brr’ed.”

            “Well son, let this be your warning,” he propped a hip against the door and grinned beneath his moustache. “Smoking kills.”

            It’s a real funny joke. Boy, _smoking kills_. They dubbed the fire a lit cigarette gone awry in the grass when grandpa dozed while smoking. He was always picking up smokes. “This morning, in fact,” said the detective. He said he had been in the same store picking up coffee.

            Mom wept and wept, wailing and incessant as grandpa’s rocking chair, but I was out of matches. But I was fine. I was smug and relaxed and prepared for a new chapter in life away from that lazy little shack on the side of a hill. I was done with stupid demands from grandpa and that dumb little dog. It brings me peace to know that puppy died in the fire, too.

            But I am more satisfied with the larger piece of meat the hunt warranted. Grandpa’s funeral was close-casketed. He was lain to rest with his wife, Elizabeth, who died two years earlier. He had been depressed since. They call that heartbreak. They couldn’t bear it.

            The day was bright and sunny and they served watermelon at the funeral.

            I was so happy that week, I about peed myself like some excitable puppy. Even if they had dubbed me the instigator, I was only five. Only a kid. What would they have done? Thrown me in some mini-slammer?

            But he was rid of me. Grandpa died asleep in the late summer, and was reunited with his wife, at least in the teary eyes of a Christian. Boy, was it lovely. I guess you could say I reunited him with his heavenly puss. Now that’s a good Samaritan.

            If you want a description of his body just ask me. I’ll write about it next time.

            Well, that’s all the story I have for today. I’d really like to tell more but my hand’s cramping and I’m starving for a burger. Remember our deal, Victor. I ain’t threatening anything but don’t you dare forget our deal. Now, I’ll write again soon. Would love to hear back from you. How is it in April Hill? Would you like to visit me in Boston? Have you gotten over your cold? What are your plans for the holidays?

            Your pal,  
            Johnny

 

            December 30, 1963  
            Dear Victor,

            MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!

            I had such a good Christmas thanks to you. I got your letter a few days before but I put it under my tree and waited like a good Christian boy, trying to act like it’s a gift. Since I ain’t got no friends I ain’t got no gifts but boy, was that exciting! I kept on thinking of it all throughout the day, while I was working or smoking dope or eating or showering. Anticipation is a real exciting thing to have. I’d think of what it might say and I’d get angry or nervous or giggly or excited, depending on the scenario I dreamed up.

            Well, it was a little unexpected. You don’t need to insult my spelling. I was expelled from school, after all, and it wasn’t like I went to a real nice college or nothing. You don’t need to call me a bastard or anything either. But I’m glad you’re being so compliant and loyal to our deal.

            I like your cursive, it made me feel like I was reading a love letter from a beautiful girl. A Dear John letter. You just needed to spritz it with some floral perfume and I’d be whiffing it like the inside of a high schooler’s cotton undies. Given your hostility in your last response, I bet you think I’m incapable of love. But I said I was no psychopath, just a bit of a gangster. I chew on cigarettes and squint but I don’t torture and kill like some sicko. I told you that. In Dante’s Inferno, the dude separates hell into two subdivisions. There’s the hell-suburbs, and then the hell-ghetto, the latter in which you get punished hardcore for premeditating shit. But the fourth circle in hell-suburbia is reserved for violence, if I remember correctly. [sic (9/18/66): The fifth circle of hell is reserved for anger/violence in _Inferno_. The fourth circle is greed.] But it’s impulsive, and never thought-out. That’s what keeps me from being a sicko. I’m probably more passionate than most people cause of such. Passion makes you go wild. I feel everything more intensely than the polite, dead-inside robots like you! I do! You just don’t know because you think anything hostile is suddenly evil. But I’m not evil. I’m only a kid.

            Passion is a lot of things, but when you phrase it that way, it’s suddenly good. I’d like you to see it that way. I want you to morph these crimes that you’ve thought of as “heinous” because of society’s implications into a glowing beam of sunlight. That is the power of words. Even if I can’t spell, these words roll around on my tongue and in my mouth and in my head and they make everything glimmer and shine. I wish you, and all the other idiots who can’t speak with extensive vocabulary like me, will someday find refuge in the power of words.

            Sweet talker.

            That’s what she called me.

            (Yes, I’ll get to your issue, but you have to read my first issues first—chronological order, like I said.)

            At fourteen I was a juvenile delinquent. I was rarely attending class. Do not ask my motivation for such. I know, it’s quite the jump from age five to fourteen, but in those years my crimes were few and varied. I had no interests but to sleep in and avoid the slow churn of school, which warranted a newfound hatred for people. People did not like me, not with my big ol’ cocaine eyes and my untucked shirttail and my slouch and my mom’s shit job as a waitress in town, waiting on the moms of other kids who knew how to part their hair with gel. People knew I made bad grades and dozed in class and ostracized me for my slacking, my thinness, and the fact I didn’t smoke. If I was going to be badass and not care about school, I couldn’t look like the nerds who did. But I did.

            By this time my overbite was growing bad and I had pockmarks of purplish acne scars. My hair was greasy, oil-slick black, and I couldn’t focus in class. Always getting chastised by teachers brought blood to my cheeks, and I’d walk out of class, which made me all the more of a pariah. You know how kids are. It was nothing serious but my status was deteriorating. Back in the day, humiliation among schoolchildren was more of a psychological detriment than now, but jeez, it still hurt. I wasn’t being whipped—not yet—but all the principal’s office trips and the failing grades just pissed me off. It didn’t motivate me to do better. I just wanted to be encased in the warmth of sleep. I found enjoyment in entire separation from adolescent upbringings. I wanted to live like an adult.

            So you can imagine how embarrassing it was to have my mom walk with me to school. She was in uniform, apron on, a big white bow cutely set over her ass, holding my shoulder while my teeth stuck over my bottom lip. I was led to the counselor’s office—a not-uncommon face greeted us—and off I was with the suggestion to play tennis to release my pent-up rage.

            I remember sitting in that office, lit with soft, calming light, everything beige and flickering candles. All these ladies have it like that. Lady therapists all decorate their therapeutic offices like the steamed-up bathroom of a sweating southern woman with Munchausen’s syndrome. Hearts and declarations of familial love plastered the walls and I can’t image a girl going to that lady about a molester dad would feel so comfortable with these hardcore praises. But it was still pretty advanced at the time—better than the harsh white, angular offices of correctional facilities that persisted. I was sitting in that office, my mom to my right and my therapist across, both of ‘em with this red-red-red lipstick, so fake and painted and smudged over the curve of their actual lips I couldn’t help but hate them both. That mouth was moving, talking shit about releasing endorphins, and how the physical ejection of energy was ‘real therapy,’ and perhaps joining a sports team could get me to make friends. And I was sat, consumed with these nasty angst-riddled teenage thoughts, hating them both and wanting them dead.

            But I didn’t want to get made fun of anymore. Any other time I would have stormed out. But something in me wanted serenity that day. Boy, I have no fucking idea why, but I was sat there wanting peace and perhaps, somewhere deep down, success. But shit, that was when I was real dumb and convinced through TV and the testimonies of people with families that success meant providing something to a community that doesn’t do shit but take dumps on your lawn and write WHITE TRASH on the walls of your house. And pretending, after all, that it’s love.

            My hand hurts! Fuck! And not for the usual reasons. (Haw haw.)

            Okay, I’m back now. I took a dump and put my hand in hot water in the tub next to the toilet.

            Well, I said ‘okay,’ to the sports thing and I joined the tennis team because as far as I could tell, there was a limited amount of lobotomy patients compared to the other options. Football, baseball, and basketball—boy, I wasn’t having any of that shit.

            So I was sat on the bench outside after school. I don’t remember why. I remember holding my piss though. I was in this polo and white shorts and I had my tennis racquet on my knees and I was dozing mindlessly in the warmth of the oncoming April. Everything smelled like asphalt and cut lawn-grass, the smell of school. Our school’s court was bracketed by a rusted, short wire fence and the leaves of bushes from outside poked through. A thicket of forest, occupied by one or two houses in its hidden depths, yawned from behind the school. (You don’t know this because you went to the private school, Victor.) Four-o-clock Texan sun was crawling through the bushes and trees and silhouetting the leaves, making its veins glow through the lush greenness of them. It was a beautiful day and you could see sap glowing like honey as it dripped down the trunks of trees. I was daydreaming or dozing or thinking of how life persisted away from the normal routine of school and this girl stepped into my view.

            She had on tube socks and white shoes and her skirt only half-covered the smooth, freckled flesh of her thighs. She had tangled hair pulled into a bun and her collarbones were prominent over the neck of her shirt. She was eating a donut, and her wrist, so thin and fragile like a mannequin’s or such, caught the glaze that was melting off of the pastry. Her pink tongue darted between her lips and she licked it up. Her laugh sounded like water dripping in a shower, sounded like rainfall on the windows of a car, soap wrung out into a sink. The light, calming, tinkling noise of cleanliness and purity. Boy, I was awestruck, my man, I tell you that. She had a big grin, all white teeth and creased eyes and I don’t know what the hell she was laughing at to this day. Even if it was at me, I’d forgive her.

            She threw a tennis ball up and smacked it across the court to whoever was playing with her. I looked at this ginger girl, significantly less attractive, with full-fleshy cheeks that housed short, yellowed teeth. But she was making my girl laugh and I could shiver at that sound. If I had a cassette tape of that noise, even now I’d weep at it. So I didn’t even hate the ginger girl for being unsightly. Everything at that time, even a quarter-bit ugly, pissed me off. Boy, I could see a locker rusting and my day’d be ruined. I really do need beauty to sustain my mind, I do. I get so mad when ugliness pervades, cause ugliness is usually all people. Even hurricanes can be beautiful.

            But not now. With this girl in my sights I was all game.

            Someone could shit right on my lap and I’d be all red and flush with pleasure. She spun on the toe of her shoe and hit the ball with the racquet. She wasn’t very good but she laughed at her own fouls and misses with a hand over her mouth.

            That was _May_. [note: name unchanged for identification reasons regarding abductions and missing persons.]

            May. May I? Like the politer version of ‘can.’ Like the month of rebirth and flora and fauna, taffy candy and bees buzzing in fields.

            I’d never seen her before cause she was in smart kid classes and, well, I sure as hell wasn’t. She never spoke to me and I never spoke to her but I knew we were going to prom. I could see her, all lithe and thin on my arm, sunkissed piece of apricot candy that she was. I would be there, somehow buffer and handsomer and with less acne with her by my side and no one would hurt me again.

            Well, I’m sure my thought process was more sophisticated than that. But I ain’t gonna go into detail of justification of a horny fourteen-year-old.

            The sun played through the loose strands of her hair while she ran to hit the ball, sweat beading on her temples and dripping down her perfect skin. Her eyes were these green gems with flecks of brown caught in them, all shimmery and emerald.

            After she finished her game I approached May.

            “Want to play me?” I says.

            “Sure,” she says. We played and I kicked her ass but I didn’t have to—I could have let myself become consumed with all her moves but I couldn’t because I needed to impress her. We finished and she went, “You’re pretty good.” But nothing that real. I took it as a proposal, though—she might have been sucking my dick when she said it.

            She pulled a tennis bag over her shoulder, and I says, “hold up.”

            “Yeah?”

            “Do you have a boyfriend?”

            Something sad came into her then and I was all flush with pleasure at the prospect that she was lonely and brokenhearted. The easiest ones are always so desperate. “Well, mama,” I says, real awkward and goofy ‘cause I was fourteen and awful, and I says, “Want to go on a walk and tell me about it?”

            We went into the forest, where patches of grass were illuminated and bugs played in the streams of pale light, and flowers grew. She didn’t say much for a second and dragged her hand along the trunk of a tall, mahogany tree, and then dropped her hand and leaned against another. Pine needles rained down and she brushed them off her head, her upturned, small nose glowing with freckles. “You know Jackson?”

            “Sure, I know Jackson.”

            Jackson, this kid with a leather jacket, always picked on me. We had gym together the year before and he’d toss my pants in the toilet. Vengeance tales spun in my wicked head, morphed by stories of winning masculinity against a tyrannical owner of a woman. “I saw him necking with some other girl—I don’t know who—in the burger shack. They were up in a booth, noses together. I left him and he yelled at me. That’s why I haven’t been at school the past few days.”

            My sweaty hands slipped on my racquet at this revelation and I dropped it in the grass. When I leaned down to pick it up, I saw up her skirt. Her panties were a soft, light pink, like the dewy flesh of her cunt under it. I licked my chapped, sweating lips, and stepped forward.

            “I’d kill him for you,” I says.

            She screwed up her face as if she smelled something foul and scratched at the back of her neck, brushing more pine needles off her skin. “Kill him? That’s messed up.”

            “I would. Pretty girls shouldn’t be talked to all down and mean by jerk-offs who don’t take care of a good thing when they see it.” Something like that. I’m paraphrasing here.

            “You don’t know anything about me.”

            “I’d like to.”

            I thought it was a real smooth transition, but her lips curled up and I felt that cold hollowness of my heart dropping down into my stomach. Her teeth showed in her mouth and she began laughing. She looked like some toothpaste model. She laughed and that link, tinkling noise started hurting, despite what I said. “Jeez! You—you? You think you and I can date? Come on. Everyone knows you’re all messed up. What, you think we’re going to make a pretty couple? Even if you were good looking, everyone knows you’re messed up!”

            What a bitch.

            That’s the thing that pisses me off about ruined beauty. You only like things you never get to know, really. I hate when you’re laying in the flowers and you come out with itchy bug bites. When the cool surface of a lake is interrupted by moss or the dead upturned belly of an ice-white fish. It can ruin your whole day. When nastiness prevails in the beautiful girlhood of my wet dreams. At least my face doesn’t hide nothing.

            (The delivery man from the music store just brought me a record! Oh boy! Do you like The Animals?)

            I was on the verge of tears, feeling real deflated and pathetic and I says, “I ain’t messed up.”

            She was laughing and shaking her head, and rested her hand on my shoulder and said, “You know, the offer’s sweet, it is, but just think! You and me? Just think of it!”

            I hated that she knew me. She knew me even though I loved her for her blank slate nothingness. I had no predilections or preconceptions about this pretty girl, I just knew she moved like a well-oiled machine, like a hazy dream sequence, and she blew my mind. But she wouldn’t give me a chance ‘cause I didn’t go to class.

            I didn’t say anything, but my cheeks were pinked with humiliation.

            “Hey, I didn’t mean to upset you,” she reached out to touch me again and I reached out with my racquet and swung it at her head. She squealed and went down and her hand went to where I split the skin with my racquet. It was drooling blood slow and wet and warm like syrup. “Stop!” she was yelling, and I hit her again, dead silent besides my heavy breathing, my arms tingling with purpose, satisfied at my hits. No lobs. I kept hitting her in the head, trying to get all those nasty thoughts of me out of that brain matter. I breathed through my teeth and kept going until she went still and soft in the forest glen and I flexed my hands.

            My hands were splattered with blood.

            So were my clothes. I sat down on the forest floor and watched her lifeless and soft and beautiful. No ugly words could come out of that mouth anymore. Her eyes were open and I crawled up and studied them, curling my body around hers and staring into her eyes. They didn’t judge me or nothing. She was a beautiful shell of nothing. She wasn’t gonna move or laugh and that sucked.

            My tongue went out and I licked her eye. Don’t ask me why I did it, man. Maybe I thought it’d be candy coated.

            Well, I stayed curled up like that for a long time before I ran home. I ran harder than ever, my skin prickled with heat bumps, the racquet hidden in my backpack.

            Well, my clothes were white but that just meant it was easier to bleach. I felt a little bad about what I’d done and I was sick a few times and prickled with fever and puked. I stayed home from school the next day, but no one was surprised. I knew I was gonna get caught, I just knew it. Her ugly redhead friend would tell the cops of the missing person I was the last one she was seen with.

            I waited.

            I waited for a few miserable days, jumping at every noise, unable to sleep because of tense anxiety stringing every bone in me. When the doorbell rang I’d rush down, just to get it over with. But nothing happened. So I went to school after three days of my illness, face pale green and nostrils flared with horror.

            I could still taste her eye on my tongue.

            I was in English, my favorite class, drawing alien UFOs on my paper, and the kids in front of me were all, “I swear, Jackson isn’t gonna survive in prison. I swear, he plays tough but everyone knows otherwise.”

            Everyone knows everything.

            In the threshold of a small town, drama circulates hard and fast and as openly as she confessed Jackson’s infidelity to me, she surely must have gone to it with others. Kids had fingers to point. He had yelled at her, after all, and she was found dead a few days after leaving him.

            I wasn’t completely giddy. Ongoing investigations still meant I was a purported [sic] suspect. I didn’t know what to do. Jackson, a big asshole, had taken the fall and perhaps he deserved it, but my security was still threatened. I was all edgy and shaken and I ran to my mama, and she said, “You’ve worried yourself sick.”

            She petted my sweaty hair and noted how much weight I’d lost, and she finally went, “That school just isn’t for you, no it isn’t. No, it isn’t, honey.”

            “No, it isn’t,” I agreed, curling my hands in her shirt and staring at her with a drained, pasty face, sleepless and gaunt and skeletal. “I gotta go. Being there makes me want to die. I could beat myself to death. All the students hatin’ me and the dead girl, all the bullies and the teachers. Oh, mama.”

            I spit up a long glob of phlegm on the floor.

            When I left the school, I left the minds of everyone else. No one noticed, not in the wake of the brutal murder of a beautiful young girl every boy wanted. No one noticed, not when a murderer was among them, their own fellow classmates. Thank god he was caught, huh?

            No one noticed.

            No one noticed.

            Well, that’s why I started going to the boys’ school with you. I’ll tell you my next story later. But I want you to keep it in your mind that all people have ever wanted in life is eternal youth. The dragging skin, the red rimmed eyes, the veins in the face rearrange over time. But she will always be remembered in the throes of beauty. The murder of May [redacted], aged fourteen, with her sunny limbs and white teeth and her tangled vineyard of brown hair that shone in the summer light. She died in the tall, soft limbs of nature. They should have left her there. Swallowed by flowers, she was like a real Persephone.

            I stopped playing tennis but I picked it up again in my last year of school. Anyway, thanks for going along with this. Let’s keep going. You gotta keep your promise.

            How are things? You didn’t answer me last time.

            Write me soon, your pal,  
            Johnny

 

            January 13, 1964  
            Dear Victor,

            I AM NOT HAPPY WITH YOUR RESPONSE! IF YOU ARE NOT NICER TO ME I WILL NO LONGER SEND YOU LETTERS AND THEN YOU’LL NEVER GET TO UNDERSTAND WHAT HAPPENED TO YOUR MOTHER. FUCK YOU, VICTOR!

            Your pal,  
            Johnny

            February 4, 1964  
            Dear Victor,

            Thank you for the kind letter. It really lifted my spirits.

            I’ll just jump into things now. You get it.

            By sixteen, I still wasn’t pegged down by responsibility. After meeting you, I realized I could be happy without societal prospects of success. I didn’t have gratitude or charm but people knew I was just a kid, a little confused and abused. Perhaps that’s why I started getting away with shit more and more often.

            You thought I was funny and friendly and we had good times in our school uniforms, smoking and drawing lewd pictures, cracking sick jokes. I’ll always remember that, Victor, and I hope you do too. We did have good times. You’re my best friend. I suppose I even loved you. But you were irritated by me at the end of things and I could see that and I had to pay off this big nice school my mama couldn’t afford just waitressing. So I got a job instead of hanging out with you after school, and I knew you were only faking to be upset.

            You’re one of those people who befriends everyone. You’re all kindness and sunshine and you probably pitied me. But we were thrust into the throes of an intense and isolated friendship of plotting and you know it was different from the polite jokes that you traded with other students, smart or dumb, pretty or ugly. We both knew I was special for you, and you for me. But you ain’t gonna admit that. Deeds always turn all goodness on its head. Well, bad things happen, Victor. But that shouldn’t erase good times.

            You know it though.

            I started working not because I wanted to be away from you, but because you wanted to be away from me! I’m that nice! YOU KNOW I AM TOO! It was never for school debt, it was only for you. They could kick me out the next day and I’d shrug and sip a drink and move on. (Maybe not so complacently as I describe, because, like I said, you were there.)

            Well, I was working at this shitty seafood shack, and if we had anything to offer besides catfish, I wasn’t aware. And I was there prepping the fish. Everyday after school I went to this shitty old shack where I skinned the scales off of catfish, got brown, shiny, bleeding fish guts all over my hand, chopped off their heads that housed vacant, beady eyes, and made the most heinous creations for slouched-over Texans. These old men with catfish sandwiches in their dentures lectured me at the counter, and I’d stew and stew, spitting in their mayo-catfish creations and sneezing on the drinks.

            They’d always say things like, “Boy, you should be taking better care of your mama. I was down at the diner and she’s, pardon me, sure beat from those hours trying to pay for your delinquent ass.”

            I could get away with shit because I was only a boy, but that didn’t warrant respect on the part of the geriatrics that envied me. By this time, you may remember, I was starting to become beautiful. I stood up straighter and all the after-school biking and eating well at your house was making me less gaunt. My face filled out and I started taking care of my hair. But there’s nothing you can do about an overbite. Old people hate those good-looking fellas that know they’re beautiful. They got charm and swagger and these old fucks were always caned at school and marched through snow to get to school and no girls would even blow them, or some pitiful shit like that. They don’t talk about that much but when they do, they gotta be within earshot of some kid that has a better life than they did.

            But the worst of these elderly hacks was my boss. I don’t know if you remember him. I used to try and tell you about him, but you were real impatient with me. You were hurting me. It PISSED me off.

            A gray, fat lump of greed, my boss was a villain from a comic book. His gut jutted out over his clit-sized dick, skin dusted with wiry grey pubes, from his shoulders to his wrists, thick as a sausage. He had a combover to obscure the bald, pale skull of his head. Among his teeth were globs of rotting plaque. His thin lips were topped with a heavy, unkempt moustache a bit too short on either end, reminiscent of our favorite German world leader. In tandem with his grotesque appearance, he spoke like a gruff bulldog and had no volume control. Everyone was ‘boy.’ He maintained only shipments and nothing else, sitting on his fat ass and directing us with a pointed, fat finger, short nail caged in red flesh. I hated him. He made my skin crawl.

            Nothing in particular triggered my actions. I suppose I just decided I was done with my depression. With meaningless schoolwork and you drifting further and further away, the last thing I wanted was humiliation. The old fuck’d always wind his thick-fingered hand, so capable of anything but work, uncalloused and fleshy, though my hair. I’d bat at his arm and yell, “Watch the ‘do!” and he’d be all, “You’re giving these customers fish with more bones than a fuckin’ graveyard!”

            Like I says, he was a real cruel fuck. He didn’t care if the customers got a bone, would even enjoy the pain in their eyes, but if he found something to hurt us about, he’d jump on it. Boy, it was hell on earth.

            Wanna hear some ironic things?

            Cat that don’t like milk.

            Deaf singer.

            Owner of a seafood restaurant that’s extremely allergic to shellfish.

            Bossman, Gerry, would take his lunchbreak right during the rush, and order his own food. From me. He singled me out in particular to give him his food—perhaps I seemed slightly less inclined to piss in his food than my coworkers. Because I was white, he could only deliver so many insults upon me. My coworkers were mostly black and that warranted all the “niggers” he could manage in one shift. Every time he’d order a catfish salad sandwich and hefty side of fries. He never ordered crabmeat, never ordered lobster, because he was very careful about the cross-contamination of food. But that didn’t mean the provider, Sweetwater Enterprises, never mixed up their deliveries. Quite often, they’d come with cans of tuna, but never shellfish. Still, the tuna was enough to send him into a red-faced rage, spittle flying at the face of the delivery man.

            Mistakes happen, you know.

            When I was making his catfish, the canned crab meat that my coworker slid to me was just a mistake. Popping it open and adding it to the bowl, drowning it in mayonnaise so it was virtually indiscernible from the catfish, was only an error. Boy, it happens to the best of us, I’ll tell you that right now, Vic.

            It has been my idea but the conspiring among us made me feel, for once, like I was a part of something, like I had friends. I didn’t even know my coworkers’ outside of this shitty, rotten threshold of a shack, but then and there it was a coup d’état. Well, it at least felt that intense in my head. I don’t know. Shut up.

            So I brought him his sandwich, the can disposed of, the deliveryman long gone.

            He took that bite between a puff of his cigar, swallowed, puffed his cigar again, and then his face swelled like a tomato. His mouth sputtered, moustache caught with flurries of spit and food particles and he clutched his heaving chest, his fat hand going to his throat to indicate its swelling.

            I stepped back and hid my smile with a hand, arm crossed over my stomach. The other customers watched, just as silent and confused and non-participatory.

            Gerry died with a heinous meal in his mouth, but in the throes of that first chomp of chemical pleasure, was it really a bad last meal?

            Of course, I lost my job, but the criminal justice system did not blame me. Sweetwater Enterprises was sued by the widow of Gerry, and I was given a pass. How would I know that there was mixed meat among the sandwich? I’m only a kid, not a scientist.

            The seafood shack closed.

            That is the most heroic outcome I’ve been responsible for to this day.

            I don’t even think you’ll call me sick for this one, Victor.

            Write soon.

Your pal,  
Johnny

November 17, 1964  
Dearest Victor,

I have to confess I cry a lot after writing these letters. Not out of guilt, but out of fear. I suppose that makes me seem real weak, doesn’t it? I wouldn’t blame you if you thought so. Really, I’m a big old crybaby. If you’re wondering why it took me so damn long to shit this thing out, it’s because I was wracked with terror at the outcome of our deal. The letters I sent should have been stretched out more, but… Since I know you’re going to the cops with them as soon as you learn what happened to your mom, I might as well limit my confessions. There are more—but you’ll never know. I’ve softened a lot of what happened, too. Let that make you feel however you want. And maybe I lied the whole time.

What a hilariously masochistic pair we are. I keep confessing and you don’t go to the cops until you have my final letter about your mother—I get to elongate my time outside of prison until I’m out of confessions. But the longer it takes, the more crimes I have to confess, the more I get indicted for. It’s a lose-lose for me, isn’t it? So I had to put this last one off for a while. I do have to thank you, though. From February to November not one police scare wrecked me. But I suppose it’s time. I’m older now and have nothing to do. I’m not amused by anything and I do not think I’ll ever find love or a job worth living for. I ain’t got no talent or money and raw beauty works only so much. I’m ready to leave this world. Not even food tastes good.

As I’m writing this, I must note I’m in a diner. It’s snowing outside already, and there’s some kids with bowl-cuts, shaken by Beatlemania. They got these thick-lensed glasses on and they’re both discussing the paranormal sightings of aliens. A big old glassy tear is tripping down my cheek while they convince themselves aliens are real and visiting us. It’s a real sweet things kids can do. Sometimes I want to have been as kind and nice as kids like them but I couldn’t make myself—everything was just so ugly and so was I and I was pissed off. (Actually, they’re starting to scare me a little, they’re talking about some Egyptian dude writing down the sighting of an alien spacecraft on a Papyrus leaf in 400 BC or something. That’s kinda freaky. What if aliens had TVs then?)

I ordered a chicken fried steak and a sweet tea, and it’s sundown now and the sky is red-black along the horizon, the clouds misting over and turning it a soft pink. It’s making my heart swell. These winter days are so sad. Life shutting down, the end of things coming around. The waitress asked me what’s wrong and she got these crooked front teeth that overlap each other and I wanna hit her. That’s how mean I am.

Two people in coats are walking by the restaurant, sharing a cigarette. Their sex is undeterminable since their hoods are up. The neon light of the restaurant burns the back of their heads and the smoke plumes pink in it, flakes of snow falling through the smoke visibly. I can imagine they’re gonna go home and baste a Thanksgiving turkey or something mundane like that. I hate that shit. At least when I fry I ain’t gotta eat some shitty food pilgrims ate a billion years ago. I hate that crummy shit.

Speaking of crummy, this steak SUCKS!

Now the kids are whispering and I’m trying to listen, but maybe I don’t want to. This stuff haunts me. I ain’t a fan of some mutated, better beings hovering over us, making us feel lesser. Humans are so proud, being at the top of the food chain. But that construct is made by humans. How are animals gonna feel shame of something they can’t read? Can you imagine, writing this shit for ourselves to make ourselves feel better and then figuring out humans ain’t even at the top?

Well, by now I bet you can guess I’m putting things off. I don’t wanna send this at all, and maybe I won’t, just to save my ass. Or maybe you’ll spare me and keep my secrets hidden out of pure love, but I doubt you’re capable of that. (Does that make you worse than me? Haw haw.)

A few more things before I start telling you what I done to your ma.

I got my overbite fixed. But I got these braces that make me look super goofy. I wonder if they provide dental work in prison?

The kids are sharing photographs of black and white UFOs and it’s freaking me out!

I replaced the steak with some waffles.

The people who were smoking kissed and left.

I keep crying, I hope you know that I’m hurt and would prefer if you didn’t show the letters. But you promised and I did too and I’m honest. Maybe. I gotta thank you—you could’a told the cops soon as you saw your mother that way and saw me leaving the house.

But you didn’t. I don’t know why you’ve protected me so long but I guess that rage always wants a motive. Not that I care—I’m too heartless to think ‘why?’ when I hear about crimes. It didn’t happen to me, so maybe that’s why I don’t give a damn.

But if you think I can’t feel pain besides anger, you’re damn wrong. Boy, I can feel hurt, and I’ve never felt more hurt until the day you stopped caring about me. After Gerry expired, I was back in school more and picked up tennis again. These days in April Hill were long and lonely and I had to fill the slow, syrupy hours with some sort of amusement. Ain’t work, ain’t you, and it was tennis. Every swing made me see May with her big eyes, flecked with gold, and made me feel the barely-there saltiness of tears and the cold wet jelly taste of nothing. I was still thinking about her, and tried to compare anyone on TV or in real life to her, but I just couldn’t. Pictures don’t do her the justice of what I saw that day.

So I was hitting the ball at the wall cause ain’t no one wanna play with me, and I was thinking how nasty and creepy that day was under the guise of rosepetal-scented love I’d been holding onto, and I didn’t wanna think of that anymore. Like a rotting body under a bed of flowers. There’s something perverted about the beautiful being corrupted by something nasty that really pisses me off. And I’d realized I’d made that happen. (But again, you could argue that I was preserving her beauty for all time. Depends on your morality. I don’t know shit about philosophy, not really. I don’t know shit about shit.)

Well, who’d wanna talk to me? Like in my old school, I was a pariah for my abrasiveness, my inability to talk to people, my constant suspension for the dumb shit I did. Asking questions like, “Why do I need to learn this?” warranted slaps and rulers on the knuckles. That school didn’t play around and I guess it helped whip me into shape. Wasn’t nearly as brutal on me socially as the last one, but I still got scars.

            Take that for what it’s worth.

            Only one person would wanna talk to me—and that was you. In this final year we’d grown distant but I was holding onto the fun beauty of carelessness we’d had. One of our last good conversations was soundtracked by me strumming a guitar and prophesizing on our new band. It’d be rock, of course. I was thinking about that when I was hitting the tennis ball, my chest a hot tight ball of anticipation and longing. It’s hard to lose a friend.

            I knew where you were because, unlike me, you’re smart. You were in the engineering club, making some shit roll or bounce or be controlled by something other than your hands. I went in, all sweaty and with my racquet, and there you were, laying on your stomach on the floor. You had on your specs and you were frowning at this metallic ball, I don’t know. You didn’t even look up when I said your name.

            “Victor?” I says.

            You just made this weird noise of acknowledgment, easily translatable to an exasperated ‘ _what_?’ if you really want to think about it. That’s how it felt and I’m sure that was the guttural delivery instinctive, but not necessarily _intended_. People like to fake being polite, after all.

            But I wasn’t dismayed.

            I just says, “Hey, Victor, it’s Johnny.”

            “Yes, Johnny, I know.” You says that but you didn’t look at me.

            I says, “Want to hang out?”

            “I’m busy.”

            “Well, can I stay here and watch?” It was after-school hours.

            “You wouldn’t be interested. It’s science.”

            “Shit, I’m good at science. Meiosis and shit.”

            A weak joke, but I thought you’d laugh. You didn’t say anything though, just made another one of those humming noises. I scratched my head with the racquet but I didn’t like that after a few nasty memories and I dropped my racquet.

            “Victor?”

            You looked at me, “Yes, Johnny.”

            “You ain’t my friend no more, are you?”

            Your mouth just thinned out and you sighed and said, “No, Johnny. We’re not friends.”

            Well, I don’t know why I didn’t repeat my actions with May upon you. I could’ve. We were alone in that club and I had my racquet but I wasn’t gonna get away with it. But I never thought about getting away with it when I did something nasty. It was just how the cookie crumbled. I began to believe there was some heavenly angel protecting my nastiness in order to make me great.

            Or perhaps a cop. Who knew?

            But I just backed out of the room, still watching you, so cold and intellectual and bespectacled and distant, and I felt like crying. I sat outside with my back parallel to the hot wall baked by the late-spring sun, and sunk down onto my ass in defeat, feeling like a deflated balloon, and that was the first time in my life I was HURT. I had my own ass handed back to me and you didn’t even care—just like I didn’t care. I realize that now.

            Well, I mourned this only friendship of mine and I wept a little and went home and tossed and turned with anger and anxiety and all the vicious, poison-footed creepy-crawlies that dig at your insides when you’re real upset. My mom, still babying me at this point in time because I was the only surviving male of her life, came in when she heard me crying. She sat on the bed in the dark and raked her hand through my hair that was heavy and slick with gel I hadn’t washed out and told me to tell her what’s the matter. I didn’t say nothing, but I held her hand, soft and weathered and I wondered what it’d be like without her. I reckon I’d get on fine but I didn’t want that to happen. And I reckoned people would function way worse than I did.

            What kind of people? People like you. You never had a job, never had no money, never had no love or friendship. You were set and you were loved and you were

            [note (9/18/66): The writing for the next two lines is smudged, and unintelligible.]

            So I went into your house then, rapped the door knowing you was out and she opened. She was wearing a pink sweater and had jeans on. A mom in jeans! Get that. When she turned around her ass was round and bouncy.

            “Who are you?”

            Even she’d forgotten me! But I did grow since the last time I was at your place. I was bigger and handsomer with cleaner skin. “It’s Johnny, Mrs. [redacted].”

            “Johnny…” she looked to wrack her brain, “Oh! Johnny! You look different.”

            “Yeah,” I says, “Can I come in?”

            “Victor isn’t here.”

            “Not a problem. We can talk, can’t we?”

            I can’t remember the rest of the conversation. Don’t remember what the hell she was on about, it was all mundane, but she let me in and she turned off her television set and offered me a cup of orange juice, and I says, no, I’m allergic to citrus.

            I don’t know why. I just wanted something to be weird about me. On the outside, I’m real normal.

            “Well, that’s a shame. This juice is fresh squeezed!” she pointed to the backyard, where a big, lush tree dotted with fleshy fruit stood in the sun. The sun was always out in April Hill. No wonder I had to move. It’s like an accusatory spotlight.

            She bent over to retrieve the juice from the fridge and I just walked up, put my hand on that baby girl powder pink fridge door and slammed her head in it over and over again, this time not silent, shrieking “FUCK YOUR SON, FUCK YOUR SON, FUCK YOUR SON,” because, well you hurt me. I slammed her head ‘til she stopped screaming and went unconscious and then I shot her in the head.

            And that’s what I did. Her head was split and her nose was caked with black blood that bubbled like some swamp creature’s home. I didn’t look too long cause I was sick with myself and I put the gun down, by her head, and I took a long drink of the orange juice and I felt a little guilty that I’d lied to her about the juice. But it filled me with great pleasure to know you did not love me and now, no one would love you either.

            Juice was good.

            You were the only one who thought you saw me leave, but you couldn’t confirm it, could you? And the detective, Samuel Robinson was all—confirmed suicide, it doesn’t surprise me. What a fool that guy was. I could swear he was the same one, moustached and strangely humorous. You know, the one I told you about the other month—smoking kills. After all these years, you’re the only one who knows I’m a filthy sack of shit deeper in the pits of hell than ugliness or stupidity warrants.

            I guess you’ll go to the cops now.

            It was a childish thing of me to do. All of it was. But I didn’t mean to. You hurt me. They hurt me. Maybe sometimes, once in a blue moon, it was for the sheer fun of it, but you won’t ever know those tales. You don’t even know if anything I’ve said is true. Maybe I’m making it all up to hurt you now, trying to get revenge after hurting me. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to talk to you, somehow, someway. Forcing you to. No one talked to me like you did, Victor. You don’t know how well you treated me because you dished out intense kindness casually. That’s a real rare gift to have. But you just had to manage it the same way you threw it out—haphazard and indiscriminately. That shit can crumble down on both the receiver and the giver.

            I think you’re crueler than me, even!

            But there, that’s what happened. I know you wanted every nasty detail of what I did to her so you can hate me more but I ain’t no sicko. I don’t take pleasure in describing it. And now I know you got one question left so I’ll answer it.

            Q: Why tell me all of this at all? Why just stay away and never get caught?  
            A: I don’t care what happens to me. At least in court, we can hang out.

            The diner’s closing and the alien kids are gone, the couple left a cigarette butt and it’s being buried by the snow. I got to go.

            You make your choice. I’m sorry to have hurt you this way, but you deserved it. You gotta admit that. I was only a kid.

            Your pal and best friend,  
            Johnny

_After the letters were turned in to the Fredericksburg Police, a short investigation held the murders of May [redacted], Gerry [redacted], and Liza [redacted] consistent with the injuries and dates described by the self-confessed murderer, Johnny Strauss. He was arrested September of 1964, after his former friend and classmate, Victor [redacted] reported his address. After a court hearing in January, April, and finally August of 1965, he was found guilty of three charges of murder. His murder of his grandfather was dismissed for his age and the inconsistencies of a match reported at the site of the fire. Sentenced to execution by electric chair, the criminal requested a last meal of crab legs and butter._

_His final words were delivered to Victor in the viewing room opposite the chair._

_“See you tomorrow, buddy.”_

_John Daniel Strauss expired at 11:30 AM, August 1965. Weather: sunny and hot._

_COLLECTED REPORT BY S.E. Robinson. COMPLETED October 17, 1965._


End file.
